Writing doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Some people find it incredibly easy to do, others struggle. Especially when it comes to ensuring their written work is optimised for search engine discoverability, better known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. But don’t worry, because we have some really easy to follow writing tips to help you improve the SEO of your articles.
But firstly, why is SEO so important?
If you have your own website, you’ll want it to rank as highly as possible on search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo! Because the higher you rank, the more likely you are to have people visiting your website. The best way to rank highly is to ensure you have good search engine discoverability, from the main pages of your site to each individual article you post.
There are a number of ways you can improve the SEO of your posts, from adding images, including links and ensuring you write your articles in a user-friendly style. You can even embed videos in your articles like this tech review website. Today though, we’re focusing on the written side of things, but we will cover the other areas too in the future.
“What are these magical writing tips” you say? Let’s take a look…
1 – Keywords are key!
When writing an article, you want to think about what it is you’re writing about and pick a keyword that describes it. For this post, for example, our keyword is SEO. You want that to appear in your title, preferably close to the start of it. And you also want it to appear in a heading elsewhere in the article too if possible, although that isn’t essential when it’s in the main headline.
Then, you want to use that keyword throughout the article. But don’t over include the word so it becomes so repetitive, as this can actually reflect badly for your SEO. It’s important to find a good balance, and if you use content management platforms like WordPress, you can use plugins such as RankMath to help you with this. You just enter your keyword and it’ll calculate based on the article length, how many times it should be included in the article.
2 – Keep your paragraphs short
One of the easiest things to do for SEO is to ensure you keep your paragraphs nice and short. There are a few reasons for this, one of the main ones is that when people see a big block of text, it puts them off. But having short sharp paragraphs that are four or five lines long doesn’t look as overwhelming, and is, therefore, more likely to encourage people to read your content.
Keeping your paragraphs short also helps you stay on point and keeps your content flowing nicely. Each paragraph should be the start of a new point or the next stage of the discussion to help it progress nicely. If you just keep writing and writing without breaking it up, it just becomes a blob of writing that people can get lost and confused in. So keep it nice, clean and simple.
3 – Make use of headlines
Not everyone uses them, but they’re actually incredibly important for your SEO. They don’t have to be big and long, much like the paragraphs they should be short and concise, and they’re an opportunity to grab the reader’s attention. It’s also important as well to ensure you include your keyword in one as mentioned above.
The benefit of having multiple headings is it helps break down your posts into sections. This makes it easier for people reading to follow your content, and helps if they’re wanting to read about a specific section for information.
For the main headline, it’s also advisable to include a number, power words, and positive/negative sentiments. These different types of words are tried and trusted words that copywriters use to attract more clicks to their articles. They help show that the article has an opinion, and people love to read opinions because it gives them an opportunity to find someone who agrees with them or someone they can disagree with and enter a discussion with.
4 – Size does matter
Whilst my girlfriend assures me that size doesn’t matter, it’s what I do with it that counts, I know that she thinks I could still write more for my articles. For good SEO it is important to provide a decent amount of text for people to read, many sites tend to go for around 500-600 words, but 800-1,200 would be the more optimum range to aim for. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the main one is Google Algorithms.
If you want your articles to rank, Google looks to try and get the best content out there to the people who want it. If someone is posting really short articles, with little information, the Google Algorithm doesn’t bother with it. Instead, it’s looking for articles with lots of content because it is more likely to have the in-depth information that a reader is looking for. Meaning having a good-sized article is ideal for SEO.
It is important to note though, we’re not saying that quantity is more important than quality. In fact, you have to try and find the balance. Sure, it’s ok to ramble on sometimes, especially if that’s something that draws your audience in as they enjoy watching you rant and rave. But you also want to keep things on topic and to the point where you can, so that everything you are talking about is relevant to your topic and is in line with your keywords.
5 – Know your audience
Probably one of the most important tips is to know your audience and who you’re writing for. It’s important that you remember who your target audience is, and that you aim your content at them. Because it’ll be those people who keep coming back to read your work. If you begin changing things up, and the way you write, it can then put people off and you can lose viewers to your website.
For example, if you have a website where you give honest opinions like this video game review website, keep your opinions honest. Because if you end up selling out and promoting products you don’t believe in, your readers will know. Some may even become nasty and message you horrible things, confronting you about selling out. You may not even realise you do it sometimes.
So that’s why we say if you’re going to put your personality into your work, keep it there. Don’t start changing the way you write for anyone. If you like to go on rants and that’s why your readers come to you, keep doing it. Because if you do change, you risk losing everything you’ve built and ruin all the hard work you’ve put into your project.
Conclusion
There is obviously a hell of a lot more to good SEO than just writing, but it does play a big part because it’s the bulk of your content. Hopefully, our writing tips help give you a better understanding of how to optimise articles for SEO purposes. If you’re still struggling though, don’t forget we do provide writing services to produce bespoke high-quality content. So that’s always a backup option.
But to ensure you’re not missing anything, and to give you the tools to optimise your articles yourself, we won’t be stopping here with our advice. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be sure to look at some other areas that will also help to improve the SEO of your posts besides some simple writing tips.
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